The International Jury of FAI met to determine the winners of the 2011 FAI Young Artists Contest, whose theme was “50 Years of Human Space Flight”. The theme of this year was tightly linked to the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s historic flight.

Was a tough decission for the jury as all the members submitted high quality paintings.

As far as I know lately the movies industry haven’t realized what big potential can be found in air sports stories. Filmmaker Christopher Webb and his team documented this story over a six-year period beginning in 2002. They shot over four hundred hours of material. They’ve been watching carefully Team Nemesis in their workshop at the Mojave Space Port in California. With such a big production and enthusiastic people behind the scenes, you might be prepared for a mixture of High Definition video and rich visuals and cinematic flare.

The Story:
Air Racer is the true story of husband-and-wife team Jon and Patricia Sharp, who risk everything to create the most advanced race plane ever made, the Nemesis NXT. Their struggle is chronicled in detail over a
four-year period, through the construction and first flight of their prototype, to three grueling race sessions at the famed Reno National Championship Air Races. The story also follows competing race pilots whom the Sharps must take on with their untested plane. Air racing legend and champion Darryl Greenamyer is the man everyone wants to beat. Greenamyer’s longtime rival, John Parker, pushes his Thunder Mustang to the brink in his quest to win. Rookie Kevin Eldredge is the first pilot to purchase an NXT kit and race it against the Sharps’ prototype.

Air Racer is the most in-depth, true-to-life film ever made about air racing. It covers one of the most exciting periods in modern air racing and is the only film to tell the story of the Nemesis NXT project.
First Edition DVDs are now available for buying. Check out the official page. If you want to get in touch with movie crew and staff, please visit their blog page, which you can also find it in our links page.

Air Sports have different biginnings. In the following set of articles we’ll try to cover all great over time aspects of air sports. The first one is about hot air balloons.

Hot air balloons

The first clearly recorded instance of a balloon carrying (human) passengers used hot air to generate buoyancy and was built by the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier in Annonay, France. After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first tethered balloon flight with humans on board took place on October 19, 1783 with the scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the manufacture manager, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon and Giroud de Villette, at the Folie Titon in Paris.

Modern hot air balloons, with an onboard heat source, were pioneered by Ed Yost beginning in the 1950s which resulted in his first successful flight on October 22, 1960. The first modern day hot air balloon to be built in the United Kingdom (UK) was the Bristol Belle in 1967. Today, hot air balloons are used primarily for recreation. Today balloon festivals are a great way to see hot air balloons close up, and are an enjoyable family outing.

WOW: Hot air balloons are able to fly to extremely high altitudes. On November 26 2005, Vijaypat Singhania set the world altitude record for highest hot air balloon flight, reaching 21,290 meters (69,852 feet, almost two times more than a passanger plane normal altitude).

COMPETITIONS: Balloon competitions are often called “races” but they’re most often a test of accuracy, not speed. For most competitive balloon flights, the goal is to fly as close as possible to one or more exact points called “targets”. Once a pilot has directed the balloon as close as possible to a target, a weighted marker with an identifying number written on it is dropped. The distance between a pilot’s marker and that target determines his or her score.